Under siege
The Russian Far East is thinly settled, but it is close to markets hungry for its primary products. To meet the demand, this part of Asia is being logged on a vast scale. The resulting environmental degradation not only affects tigers, but dozens of other species, including moose, sika deer, saiga antelope, leopards, brown bears, and black bears.

With a price on its head . . .
. . . and skin, and bones, and teeth, and whiskers, and eyes, and sexual organs. Tiger parts are used to make highly valued traditional medicines in Asia. A Siberian tiger carcass can reportedly bring $30,000 or more on the black market. Other animals fetch sizeable sums, too: gall bladders of Asiatic black bears, for example, go for as much as $55,000.

Nadirzda means "hope" in Russian.
It is also the name of a female Siberian tiger cub that was rescued after its mother was shot by poachers in 1992. Nadirzda now lives in the Indianapolis Zoo. Hope for the Siberian tiger is taking the form of international cooperative programs in which Russian agencies are working with organizations like the World Wildlife Fund, the Tiger Trust in Britain, and the University of Idaho's Hornocker Wildlife Research Institute to create and maintain tiger preservation sites. Also, international efforts are being mounted to limit logging in the Pacific territories of Russia.

Poachers are enemies of nature,
says this sign on a road in the Sikhote-Alin Biosphere Reserve in Russia. (Russian translation courtesy of Peter Ward, Office of International Affairs, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.)

Reserves have been established to protect Siberian tigers and their habitat, but poaching continues. In 1994-1995, at least sixty-five Siberian tigers were poached in the Russian Far East -- about a quarter of all those believed to be alive at the time. This devastating rate of overexploitation has led some conservationists to predict that the Siberian tiger is doomed to extinction by the turn of the century.